85 Getting the Frame into the Picture: Wells, West, and the Mid-War Novel Debra Rae Cohen University of South Carolina Through/Behind the Window It’s one of the most iconic images of the Great War: two women support each other as they stare out a window, a child beside them, clinging. Outside, rolling hills, lushly green, and the end of a uniformed troop of soldiers, marching out of the frame: the caption is “Women of Britain Say— ‘GO!’” Created by the artist E. V. Kealey for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1915, the poster spawned imitations during the war itself, and has since become one of the most frequently cited visual texts in academic disputes about the significance and effect of Great War propaganda (Figure 1). Yet whether we deem such posters, as in Jay Winter’s view, part of a “grammar of consent” that reflected “an existing and powerful consensus” (38, 42), or see them as “rhetorics of shame and coercion” (Albrinck 323), we cannot help but acknowledge the way in which viewers are implicated in the poster’s perspective. As viewers, we stand behind the women, “in” the interior space; the window frames our glimpse of the marching column. But the poster also makes available a species of double vision—one rarely acknowledged in analyses of its significance as part of the gendered regime of Great War propaganda discourse. If the framing within the poster delineates, as Meg Albrinck has suggested, gendered spaces and behaviors—locating the viewer in a noncombatant posture from which she will or will not assent to (and he be shamed by) the caption’s exhortation—the double framing by window and poster’s edge, the framing of the act of framing—simultaneously exposes these processes. Far more than other gendered propaganda exhortations (“Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” and the like), “Women of Britain Say—‘GO!’” operates as a self-conscious media artifact, commenting on the very construction of the viewer that it performs. In its employment of and attention to the animating tropes of gendered propaganda, the poster thus implies two different reading practices, two different models for negotiation between the individual and the apparatus of manipulation—one that involves assent or The Space Between, Volume VIII:1 2012 ISSN 1551-9309 86 THE SPACE BETWEEN disputation within the formal and ideological frame, and the other that resists (as far as possible) such integration by exposure of its terms. If, as Mark Wollaeger has argued, the unprecedented British propaganda apparatus of the Great War helped precipitate a crisis of information control to which modernist form multiply represents both symptom and response,1 “Women of Britain Say—‘GO!’” demonstrates such multiple negotiations already at work during the war itself. Figure 1. E. V. Kealey’s recruitment poster, 1915. The poster’s tension between what one might call a diegetic, integrative relation to the propaganda message (engaging it within the frame) and an extradiegetic, metacritical one (engaging with the act of framing)2 in fact reflects and illuminates the intertextual relations between two important wartime novels, H. G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918). Though both novels are deeply concerned with limning the pervasiveness Cohen Getting the Frame into the Picture 87 of propaganda, both official and unofficial, on the home front, Wells treats it as overt subject, measuring it through the disillusion of his protagonist, whose sloganeering must be revised by circumstance—yet he himself both reproduces without comment many gendered propaganda tropes, and structures the conclusion of his novel in such a way as to keep its revelations strictly, as it were, within the frame. West, by perhaps deliberate contrast, slips both acknowledged and unacknowledged imagery from wartime propaganda into the consciousness of her unreliable narrator to expose the broader operations of what Wollaeger, using Jacques Ellul’s term, calls “integration propaganda.” As Wollaeger explains, integration propaganda includes not just the state manifestations of “official war culture,”3 but also “more diffusely constellated organizations and institutions, such as advertising, public relations, and popular films, whose interactions effectively reinforce political propaganda” (9). Unlike in the top-down model of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “culture industry,” in Ellul’s formulation individuals “collaborate in their own subjection” because the rationalizing processes of modernity—including, as here, war—create “needs that only propaganda can fill” (Wollaeger 9, 10). Such a concept is particularly germane to the propaganda environment of the Great War, in which state intervention, though unprecedented, was, as Patrick Deer notes, hardly monolithic, relying on the participation of “a largely loyal, patriotic, and often jingoistic Home Front press and mass culture” (37). Among the needs that propaganda can provide is, signally, the comfort of closure. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, novels such as Wells’s and West’s, written during the course of the conflict, should be seen as compositions in crisis; they operate under a peculiar set of generic constraints over and above the well-documented material wartime restrictions of censorship, seizure, and prosecution, constraints that form and deform them in ways that set them apart from fictions written after the conflict, when closure is untroubled and myth is codified.4 The epistemological suspension of mid-war writing, the problem of how one enacts closure when the times themselves refuse it, frequently involves the creation of a peculiar “framing” by genre that legitimates the consolations of a decisive ending—the “consoling coherence” that, as Wollaeger puts it, “is the special province of propaganda” (27). Popular wartime fictions thus often garb in the trappings of genre, especially romance, the trajectory of the conversion narrative, which offers its own built-in teleology. As Jane Potter has chronicled, in such novels the satisfactory coming together of lovers both structurally coincides with and ideologically ennobles the inevitable parting-by-war of those lovers that served in lieu of closure. Such standardized plotting disguised as well the very uncertainties inherent in the neologism “home front.” Even as the 88 THE SPACE BETWEEN dichotomy of home and front was destabilized by the new logic of total war these novels—like the diegetic scene of “Women of Britain Say—‘GO!’— reassuringly reasserted the absolute (and absolutely gendered) difference between those terms by their final emphasis on the soldier’s departure. And in moving towards a moment of valediction that was also an assertion of unity, they reflect a more general wartime embrace of the mechanics of conversion as a reassuring rationale for literary closure. Indeed, virtually all Great War home front fiction can be read as conversion narrative, whether patriotic or pacifist, chronicling a shift in attitude towards the war and presenting it as exemplary. Romances like Ruby Ayres’s Richard Chatterton, V.C., for instance, typically depict the “transformation” of effeminate slacker into manly patriot; the rhetoric of conversion is rendered in the terms of the romance, allowing for an emphatic closure in the acceptance of the newly masculinized soldier figure by his designated mate. If the narrative of conversion by definition enacts the initiation and socialization of an individual, his or her inscription into broader societal norms and practices (Peters 3), in Great War novels this translates into the individual’s incorporation into a figure of national unity (or often, in pacifist narratives, a projected universal spiritual unity). Not only is this of course a trajectory that’s perfectly adapted for the bearing of propaganda messages; more importantly, it reiterates the totalizing nature of most propaganda form. The conclusion of a classic conversion narrative always exhorts the reader, explicitly or by implication, “go thou and do likewise.” In the mid- war narrative, such an exhortation—a definite imperative when definitive statement is elusive—amounts to a hubristic assertion of the author’s power. In other words, it claims to offer certainty that the mid-war world cannot. In some cases the plot itself becomes secondary, an excuse for the exhortatory performativity of its ending, and the security of the totalizing message, the assertion of meaning, that this allows.5 While the conversion narrative may itself be a tightly structured genre, with defined and nearly constant attributes, it is also one that cannot acknowledge itself as such, cannot view itself as a medium: its coherence, dependent as it is on exemplarity, lies in the assumption of the exact contiguity between the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds. The Public Private War Examining West’s and Wells’s novels in these terms illuminates the relationship between two books that have in the past been linked, if at all, only reductively, through the relationship of their authors. Indeed, it’s become a convention in West scholarship to lament the fact that despite her prominence as journalist, novelist, literary and cultural critic, and political savant—and despite a spate of recent efforts to establish her as a legitimate Cohen Getting the Frame into the Picture 89 presence within canons both modernist and intermodernist—much discussion of West’s career is still circumscribed by the impulse to read it in light of her ten-year affair with Wells and the birth, on 4 August 1914, of their illegitimate child.6 Early readings of The Return of the Soldier, written when West was living in seclusion after her son Anthony’s birth, found it difficult to escape a kind of biological determinism: and the book may be West’s only novel consistently in print as much because of its surface endorsement of a comforting and essentialist myth of motherhood seen as organically derived from West’s own maternity as for its subtle experimentalism, its accessible anti-war message, and its compact, undergraduate-friendly, readability.